Building an Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage of the Present

A lot has been written on the internet enabling us to preserve cultural artifacts; the traces of our society like no other medium. Equally numerous are the proposals on how to best organize this heritage of the future. This paper takes as an example the recent experience of the Covid-19 epidemics and introduces into an agile infrastructure which supports the collection, annotation and preservation of testimonies during this period. The idea has been developed in France under the name ‘Covid-19 Museum’. (Rozenholc 2021) What distinguishes this initiative from others addressing the same phenomena, lies in the width of the content imagined to be collected (from news items over scientific debates to individual narratives) and the underlying infrastructure which obliges FAIR principles of data preservation and respects ownership of content at the same time (Tykhonov 2021), closely related to current debates on structuring the EOSC. For the DARIAH Annual Event, we zoom in on the technological challenges to create an open, still protected memory space in collaboration with cultural heritage data providers (in this case the Archives Départementales) and linking it to other large Pan-European initiatives on Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (such as the Time Machine Europe). More particularly; we zoom into the epistemological framework behind the Covid-19 Museum which is particularly rooted in oral history, cultural studies, and creating musea and encyclopedia as a sharable body of knowledge. At the same time, by creating such a heritage space of the recent past, the project aspires to understand the effect of such a singular event on the future of a society system which is intrinsically anticipatory. The paper is mostly related to the stream ‘Sustainable workflows for data management and curation’ of the conference.

References

Rozenholc Y., Covid-19 Museum or how to aggregate the traces left by the pandemic in a virtual museum, The Conversation (31 January 2021) https://theconversation.com/covid-19-museum-ou-comment-agreger-lestraces-Laissees-par-la-pandemie-dans-un-musee-virtuel-147327, https://web.archive.org/web/20230202150839/https://theconversation.com/covid-19-museum-ou-comment-agreger-les-traces-laissees-par-la-pandemie-dans-un-musee-virtuel-147327

Slava Tykhonov. (2021, April 9). Building COVID-19 Museum as Open Science Project. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5838207